Gender Politics With Margaret Thatcher: Vulnerability and Toughness

This paper looks at Margaret Thatcher’s political career in the light of gender. The thrust of the argument is that Margaret Thatcher’s career can best be understood when interpreted as a combination of vulnerability and toughness, in which toughness was a shield against vulnerability. Thatcher started her political career in the 1950s, at a time when very few women held parliamentary or government posts in the United Kingdom or any other country in Western societies. It was of paramount importance for female politicians in the past to downplay their gender. The important political figures were all male, so it was the male perspective that counted. Women politicians were less prominent and should be as self-effacing as possible. Margaret Thatcher tried to make herself invisible through perfection. A perfected political image and a perfected image of her private and family life was her answer to the problem of being a woman in a man’s world and the vulnerability this implied. Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs show just how vulnerable she was as a female politician despite the tough image she often projected.